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Dissatisfied with Docker

robert.ocallahan.org

11–20 of 229 posts

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#11

The article is completely on point. Because of all the reasons exposed there (and a few more) I started Wasmer, a new container system based on WebAssembly - https://wasmer.io/ Here are some advantages of Wasmer vs Docker: * Much faster startup time * Smaller containers * OS independent containers (they can run in Linux, macOS and Windows) * Chipset independent containers (so they can run anywhere: x86_64, Aarch64/AR…

Wasmer looks interesting.

I couldn’t read much as I get an “unexpected error” as soon as I start scrolling. It does say that it’s not optimised for mobile.

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#12
post #2

I am currently on this train. Having used rkt in the past, I went to revisit it recently only to find this: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2019/08/16/cncf-archives-the-rkt-pr... I am so extremely disappointed in the CNCF as rkt (at the time, at least) seemed to be more "production ready" than Docker. Are there any real alternatives? Is the answer "find something else that uses containerd in a more friendly way?" Is the ans…

Maybe containerd [0] is an alternative? It's being used in k3s instead of Docker.

[0]: https://containerd.io/

edit: I didn't notice that you mentioned this in your comment, my bad. Can you explain why it doesn't work for you? I'm new to the Docker-alternative scene and thought it looked pretty good at first glance.

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#13
post #6

I'm newer to the Docker scene but haven't really found any of the complaints in this article realized in my work. Faster speed would be nice but I don't really mind it now. I see a lot of complaints about the docker daemon and root privileges on HN and I've tried to understand where they are coming from but I can't get anywhere. For instance, I understand the reasoning behind "if there is no need for a daemon there s…

We have observed the daemon getting into a bad state and stopping responding to container create requests, wedging our production system. I guess this kind of bug could happen with a non-daemon approach if there's shared state, but it seems less likely.

Not using any components with root privileges obviously makes things more secure.

Another benefit of not requiring a daemon or privileges is that then it should be easy to manage fully independent sets of containers. In particular a container should be able to manage its own nested containers in a straightforward way. This is painful in Docker.

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#14

The article is completely on point. Because of all the reasons exposed there (and a few more) I started Wasmer, a new container system based on WebAssembly - https://wasmer.io/ Here are some advantages of Wasmer vs Docker: * Much faster startup time * Smaller containers * OS independent containers (they can run in Linux, macOS and Windows) * Chipset independent containers (so they can run anywhere: x86_64, Aarch64/AR…

One thing I also find sorely lacking in Docker is the ability to run your containers with the appropriate seccomp privileges (in order to enforce Principle of Least Authority). I know this is possible with Docker, but it's not really done much in practice because of various difficulties. I wonder how difficult it would be to do that with your tool?

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#15

These are real problems with docker, but do we wanna talk about docker for Mac? A total performance disaster. https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ao...

I have no idea how, but Docker for Mac was taking up a whopping 65GB of space in one of the cache folders in ~/Library, although I had uninstalled it months ago. I wish I had taken a screenshot, but I was honestly dumbfounded. I had used it maybe once, ever.

EDIT: It turns out I’m not making this up/an edge case, at least 940 people have run into this too: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/371

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#16
post #11

The article is completely on point. Because of all the reasons exposed there (and a few more) I started Wasmer, a new container system based on WebAssembly - https://wasmer.io/ Here are some advantages of Wasmer vs Docker: * Much faster startup time * Smaller containers * OS independent containers (they can run in Linux, macOS and Windows) * Chipset independent containers (so they can run anywhere: x86_64, Aarch64/AR…

Wasmer looks interesting. I couldn’t read much as I get an “unexpected error” as soon as I start scrolling. It does say that it’s not optimised for mobile.

Thanks for reporting it!

We will investigate and try to fix it ASAP :)

PS: if you could provide your device info (os and browser) it would be awesome

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#17

The article is completely on point. Because of all the reasons exposed there (and a few more) I started Wasmer, a new container system based on WebAssembly - https://wasmer.io/ Here are some advantages of Wasmer vs Docker: * Much faster startup time * Smaller containers * OS independent containers (they can run in Linux, macOS and Windows) * Chipset independent containers (so they can run anywhere: x86_64, Aarch64/AR…

Looks like an interesting project. I know the website isn't responsive, but adjusting the current meta viewport declaration would go a long way while you're working on a full solution. The minimum zoom of 1 makes it unusable in practice right now on a small mobile viewport due to the amount of panning it forces you to do.

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#18

These are real problems with docker, but do we wanna talk about docker for Mac? A total performance disaster. https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ao...

Seriously. It's absolute trash. I don't even want to think about how much time I've lost waiting for startup and teardown operations.

Edit: Before you downvote me too heavily, go give the issues list a thorough read. Some of the problems are quite bad. Perhaps I could have said it in a nicer, but really, it's bad, and it's been bad for a good long while now.

Re: Dissatisfied with Docker

#20

These are real problems with docker, but do we wanna talk about docker for Mac? A total performance disaster. https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Ao...

I hate how the Docker team called it native. Docker for Mac/Windows still run in a hypervisor because so much of Docker is specific to Linux/cgroups. There was a FreeBSD port of Docker that attempted to implement a lot of the Docker API using zfs+jails but it went unmaintained and was never ported to the newer modular Docker implementation.

You're always going to get that performance hit with the hypervisor layer there.

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